Meta AI director quits to build a Microsoft Office rival

Rohit Patel spent eight years building AI at Meta, most recently as a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company's main AI lab. Now he has left and launched a startup called Ndoc. The goal is modest: replace Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.

The pitch is to stop shuffling data between Excel, Word, PowerPoint, dashboards and a ChatGPT window. In Ndoc everything sits in one document with three tabs. Stage holds slides, dashboards and mini apps where you can drag sliders and run scenarios. Narrative holds the write-up with citations and charts. Model holds the raw data and the Python scripts behind every number.

That last part matters to Patel. At Meta he worked on reinforcement learning and on judging whether AI output can be trusted. If a model builds the spreadsheets and decks a company bases decisions on, people should be able to see how it got there, so the code behind every chart is visible.

In practice you upload a dataset, ask for an analysis and a written summary, and optionally set the audience and tone. Under the hood it runs on a mix of open models, which Patel says makes it cheaper to run than tools built on frontier commercial models. A document exports as a single .ndoc.html file that opens in any browser, and the format spec is set to be open under Apache 2.0.

Ndoc is a team of three with no outside funding so far. It is running an enterprise pilot and a limited alpha for people on the waitlist. Signing up is free, usage and tokens are paid. A beta is promised in the coming weeks, with a full launch in 2027.

People have tried to kill the office suite many times and it is still here. An open file format instead of yet another subscription is at least a sensible angle.